This is something most of us hear but if the ratings of reality shows, videos of people fighting and news stories of narcissism, over inflated egos and down right abuse indicate anything, it’s that most of us have an unhealthy obsession with drama. We claim to hate it, yet you don’t really wish to remain drama free unless you walk away no matter what the cost.

If you don’t feel comfortable telling your 5 best friends, or 5 closest family members your dreams and ambitions, then you need to evaluate closely what those relationships are really. You may have to step back from your mother – radical notion. You may have to let your sister’s calls go to voicemail and only call back when you really are free and well rested. No high performance professional that I know, no millionaire who started their own company that I know allow any kind of bullshit in their intimate life. Not one. The family members that don’t support them, they’ll just see them at neutral family functions. The “friends” who used them, they no longer bother with. What ends up happening is that people stop bringing you drama. When the drama makers see you now, they act civil. This is because once you are known for calling out drama into the light and exposing the motives behind the behavior, everyone kind of gets quiet.

To drive your ambitions, to hone your craft, to meditate on your divine purpose, to build your empire, to nurture your mutually respected relationships, to study, work, strive, network, document, articulate, formulate, conversate, collaborate….it takes WORK and TIME. None of which you have available to you if you’re constantly surrounded by folks who are not there yet, refuse to do their own work and attempt to keep you from doing yours.

We have gifts that we are here to share with the world. Don’t let those who don’t want to find theirs stop you from finding yours.

Scaring yourself once per week

Do you remember when you were a kid and you would push the limits? Swing so high on the swing set that it rocked a little? Jumped from the highest branch? Cliff jumped into the water? Got on the newest roller coaster? Why did y do those things? Because there was this feeling in our tummies that we would get right before we did these things. As we did them, we became no longer afraid of them.

I’m going to let all of the anxious people in on a little secret, the feeling of light anxiety and excitement are physiologically the same inside the body; adrenaline, dopamine…it’s how we frame those feelings in our minds that will tell our consciousness what it is. When I get butterflies because I’m about to walk into an important meeting, I know that it’s because I want to succeed more than anything, not because I’m in danger. To get used to that feeling and become fearless, we have to create it often. Go cliff jumping, or call someone that you want to resolve something with and invite them to coffee.

The more we put ourselves in situations where we are forced to expand, we will continue to expand. It’s that simple.

Taking yourself out for a nice quiet outing

When I took a sabbatical from dating men, I decided to date myself. I treated myself the way that I wanted a man to treat me. It wasn’t so long after I started to do this that I didn’t even pay attention to men and really enjoyed my own company. I would go to a nice sushi restaurant by myself. I would force myself to interact lightly with others, but then learn to come back within. I also got really good at not denying myself anything; spa days, retreats, staying in a fancy hotel in another city. Burning a few personal days to go fox hunting and out to lunch with my equestrian friends. Flying cross country to have an adventure with a friend…

Lo and behold nearly 10 years later, there’s a lot of people I’m responsible to and a lot of work product that I produce in a day. I sometimes have to force myself to take time for me. This may no longer look like an entire day of leisurely horseback riding, but 20 minutes will do. My trick with a family, career, projects, and horses is to create multiple pockets of times. I may take 10 minutes to run down to the coffee shop and treat myself to a latte. I may take my commute to the barn to give myself a motivational speech…you don’t always need a tropical oasis to treat yourself well.

You’ll reap a bigger benefit by treating yourself well small ways often rather than a grand gesture every now and again.

Community involvement

I don’t mean just running a 5k or picking up trash once per year, I mean getting involved. Get to know your neighbors by attending block parties, or starting one. Attend their garage sales, find a civic association to join. Find out when the Mayor is hosting a town hall. Change things on the local level and the national level will take care of its self. We tend to overlook the small things in favor of the grander scale, what needs to be realized is that it’s the small things that make the grander things sustainable.

We need to go back to community and if you don’t see a community to capitalize on, then it is your duty to create one.

Constantly network & circulate your resume

The reasons for doing this are numerous. In networking and circulating your resume, you are putting yourself in front of many people and creating your personal brand. Then one person knows someone that you should talk to, that person has an event for you to attend and you find yourself building a professional community to constantly collaborate with or refer to. This is how business gets done.

In circulating your resume you find yourself given opportunities to add to that very resume, and you also open yourself to feedback from people who you admire, and also from people who don’t have your best interests at heart. Both instances have things for you to learn from.

We live in an evolving society and there may not be “job security”, but there is “career security” so long as you remain proactive in expanding your professional reach. A really good friend of mine and I attend several networking functions in a year. We meet up before hand, have a drink and then hit the floor. We go our separate ways, meet up again, bring people over for each of us to meet and we leave with massive connections and spend an hour the next day adding contacts to our address book and sending follow up hellos and scheduling meet up coffees via email.

While on this topic, I would like to mention LinkedIn. This platform should be for networking, encouragement, utmost professionalism, accomplishments and collaboration. Lately so many posts have started to look like Myspace with drama and nastiness. A Founder/CEO of a multimillion dollar corporation once told me that before he decided to take a meeting with me he Googled me and read my LinkedIn thoroughly. I’m happy to report that we closed the deal.

There are some less formal platforms out there that you can keep private and say what you want if you chose, LinkedIn isn’t one of them if you want to be taken seriously. Even if you have to go on Fivver and hire a professional resume and profile writer, you do that and you keep a spit shine on those things. Headshots are not that expensive and you can always have a friend take a nice one of you for free. NO mirror selfies or duck lips. Seriously, it’s sad that I had to say that but these things will make the difference between getting the meeting/hired or not.

There are some less formal platforms out there that you can keep private and say what you want, LinkedIn isn’t one of them if you want to be taken seriously.

Understand that there is such thing as too much ambition

There may be those of us who tend to push too hard to the point that there is no gratitude for what’s already in front of them. There are also those who become so blinded by ambition that it leads them to do hurtful things to others. It’s easy to loose focus and drive too hard towards all of your goals and dreams, some of which you don’t even know that you want yet, and not appreciate just how far you’ve already come.

To the people who are stuck in the middle; those who have accomplished a lot of emotional hurdles, and who’s divine life construction is not yet wherein the phase that you thought it would be, I urge you to remember Rome, Italy;

There is no possible way that anything that beautiful, that elaborate, or that long standing, was built in a day. Rome took lifetimes to build. It took generations. Each generation built something beautiful for the next generation to build upon. No one worried about whether or not they would get to reap the benefits of their labor, they just started. Then the next generation had something exquisite to evolve. They understood that in order for their city to be built, they had to think down the road, beyond themselves, and that it was all going to take time. They had the artistic vision that fit their era of their time, they had the discipline to show up everyday, and they had such patience to just enjoy the process that they never thought about the end result. I’m thinking that if we just show up everyday and just do what we know we’re supposed to, we’ll be fine.

The end result is infinite, just enjoy the building of it.

Meditation

I will admit that this is one that I need to get better at. In order to jump start myself, I always find it better to go to sanga at Buddhist Temple. Just like with everything worth while, it takes discipline. We have a saying in the horse world and it is “It takes discipline to instill the discipline to have discipline”. It doesn’t usually come easy, but discipline is like a muscle that you have to exercise to get stronger and meditation helps with doing just that.

By now most people understand the wide spread health and mental benefits to meditation, and maybe that why some people don’t do it. As humans we can be prone to self-sabotage due to feeling unworthy. But why wouldn’t you want to think more clear? Be less prone to emotionally reacting before thinking? Lowered blood pressure and greater awareness? If you’re turned off by even a simple 7 minute mediation, you may want to ask yourself these questions. You can find guided mediations to get you started on YouTube and several apps are both effective and free.

It doesn’t usually come easy, but discipline is like a muscle that you have to exercise to get stronger and meditation helps with doing just that.

Turning off the television

Seriously, is this even entertainment anymore? Or is it a constant infiltration into your brain on what to buy and who to fear? Throwbacks on Netflix and Hulu aside, is there anything that is really worth your time away from building your empire? Is crushing that season going to pay you well in retirement? If you don’t really want anything out of life, then do what you want. But if you are one of those people constantly complaining that you don’t have time to take care of your basic life processes, then check how much time your spending zoning out.

Throwbacks on Netflix and Hulu aside, is there anything that is really worth your time away from building your empire?

Life is as hard and complicated as we make it. The same can be said for success. It actually can come easier with Power Habits and good foundations in place. You need to be around people that have just as much vision as you do, and you need to create habits that set you up for success. The above are ideas that have proven effective for some of the most wealthy and successful people that I know and have read about. I know they work because I do them.